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Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the ""filibuster,"" has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate. What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into pa

Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the 'filibuster, ' has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Wawro and Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the 19th and early 20th century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate. What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into parliamentary chaos. They show that institutional patterns of behavior induced by inherited rules did not render Senate rules immune from fundamental changes. The authors' theoretical arguments are supported through a combination of extensive quantitative and case-study analysis, which spans a broad swath of history. They consider how changes in the larger institutional and political context--such as the expansion of the country and the move to direct election of senators--led to changes in the Senate regarding debate rules. They further investigate the impact these changes had on the functioning of the Senate. The book concludes with a discussion relating battles over obstruction in the Senate's past to recent conflicts over judicial nominations.--Book jacket flap.

The recent moves by senators to impose majority cloture for nominations provides a unique opportunity for advancing our understanding of the evolution of the Senate into a supermajoritarian institution. We integrate discussion of alternative theoretical perspectives on Senate development and path dependence to shed new light on mechanisms of stability and change, concluding that the perspective that Senate majorities have generally maintained supermajority procedures because they preferred them to the alternative of majority rule has more explanatory power than does the perspective that Senate majorities were "locked in" to these procedures by previous institutional choices.

Seeking to advance historical studies of political institutions and behavior, we argue for an expansion of the standard methodological toolkit with a set of innovative approaches that privilege parameter heterogeneity to capture nuances missed by more commonly used approaches. We address critiques by prominent historians and historically oriented political scientists who have underscored the shortcomings of mainstream quantitative approaches for studying the past. They are concerned that the statistical models ordinarily employed by political scientists are inadequate for addressing temporality, periodicity, specificity, and context-issues that are central to good historical analysis. The innovations that we advocate are particularly well suited for incorporating these issues in empirical models, which we demonstrate with replications of extant research that focuses on locating structural breaks relating to realignments and split-party Senate delegations and on the temporal evolution in congressional roll-call behavior connected to labor policy during the New Deal and Fair Deal. Adapted from the source document.

We argue that even as the Senate filibuster poses serious governance challenges in todays Congress, it persists because most senators prefer to maintain the minoritys right to obstruct. We consider what this rank-and-file support for the filibuster tells us about the nature of individual senators preferences and about the Senate as an institution. We believe that continued support for the filibuster underscores the importance of personal power and publicity goals, the ability of rules to provide political cover for legislators, and the role of shared understandings about the appropriate use of rules and about the Senates place in the political system. Where nineteenth-century senators propagated a set of beliefs that limited the legitimate use of obstruction, todays senators have developed an alternative set of beliefs that bolsters the institutional role of the filibuster. Under these circumstances, reform will likely require substantial pressure from outside the institution rather than emerging from within the Senate. Adapted from the source document.

We review debates concerning the evolution and impact of parliamentary obstruction in the U.S. Senate, focusing on path dependency versus remote majoritarian perspectives. We consider the viability of circumventing supermajority requirements for rules changes by using rulings from the chair to establish precedents. Because the viability of this approach depends, at least in part, on the anticipated reaction of the public, we conduct a preliminary analysis of public opinion data from the 1940s through the 1960s and from the showdown over the obstruction of judicial nominees in 2005. We contend that the balance of the evidence favors the position that senators have generally supported the maintenance of the filibuster and have been able to make procedural adjustments when obstruction threatened a committed majority's top priorities, although we offer some important refinements required in comparing the historical operation of obstruction to its impact in today's Senate.

We review debates concerning the evolution and impact of parliamentary obstruction in the U.S, Senate, focusing on path dependency versus remote majoritarian perspectives. We consider the viability of circum-venting supermajority requirements for rules changes by using rulings from the chair to establish precedents. Because the viability of this approach depends, at least in part, on the anticipated reaction of the public, we conduct a preliminary analysis of public opinion data from the 1940s through the 1960s and from the showdown over the obstruction of judicial nominees in 2005. We contend that the balance of the evidence favors the position that senators have generally supported the maintenance of the filibuster and have been able to make procedural adjustments when obstruction threatened a committed majority's top priorities, although we offer some important refinements required in comparing the historical operation of obstruction to its impact in today's Senate. Adapted from the source document.